Category: NLP in general

Ideas about NLP in general

A C E F G H I J L M N O P R S T U V

Age

The first generation of NLP trainers is getting older. So it becomes important to take note of what Nietzsche writes on age. For we do want to prevent first generation NLP trainers to canonize NLP.

The philosopher and age. – It is not wise to let the evening judge the day: for it means all too often that weariness sits in judgment on strength, success and good will. And great caution is likewise in order with regard to age and its judgment of life, especially as, like evening, age loves to dress itself in a new and enticing morality and knows how to put the day to shame through twilight and solemn o·r passionate silence. The reverence we accord the aged man, especially when he is an aged thinker and sage, easily blinds us to the aging of his mind, and it is always necessary to draw forth the signs of such an aging and weariness out of their hiding-place – draw forth, that is to say, the physiological phenomenon behind the moral predispositions and prejudices – so as not to become the fools of reverence and injurers of knowledge. For it not infrequently happens that the aged man is subject to the illusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth and from the sensibility thus engendered in him passes judgment on the work and the course of his life, as though it was only now that he had been endowed with clear sight: and yet the inspirer behind this feeling of well being and these confident judgments is not wisdom but weariness. Its most dangerous characteristic is probably belief in their own genius, which usually assails great and semi-great men of the spirit only at this frontier of their life: the belief they occupy an exceptional position and enjoy exceptional rights. The thinker visited by this belief henceforth considers himself permitted to take things easier and, as genius, to promulgate decrees rather than demonstrate: yet it is probably the drive to seek relief for weariness of mind which is the most potent source of this belief; it precedes the latter, even though the reverse may seem to be the case. Then: at this time of life one wants, in accordance with the thirst for enjoyment which characterizes the weary and aged, to enjoy the results of one’s thinking instead of testing and sowing them out again, and to that end needs to make them palatable and enjoyable and to get rid of their dryness, coldness and lack of spice; and so it happens that the aged thinker appears to elevate himself above the work of his life, though in reality he ruins it through infusing it with enthusiasms, sweetness, spices, poetic mists and mystic lights. This is what happened in the end to Plato, this is what happened in the end to that great honest Frenchman beside whom, as embracer and conqueror of the strict sciences, the Germans and English of this century can place no rival, Auguste Comte. A third sign of weariness: that ambition which burned in the great thinker’s breast when he was young, and at that time could find satisfaction in nothing, has also grown old; now, like one who can afford to lose no more time, he reaches for coarser and broader means of satisfaction, that is to say for the satisfactions of active, dominant, violent, conquering natures: from now on he wants to found, not structures of thought, but institutions which will bear his name; what does he care now for ethereal victories and honors in the realm of demonstrations and refutations! what do being eternalized in books, a tremble of
exaltation in the soul of a reader, mean to him! The institution, on the other hand, is a temple – that he knows well; and a temple of enduring stone will keep its god alive more surely than will the sacrificial gifts of rare and tender souls. Perhaps he will also encounter at this time for the first time that love which is more appropriate to a god than to a man, and his whole being will grow gentler and sweeter beneath the rays of such a sun, like fruit in autumn. Indeed, he will in fact grow more divine and more beautiful, this great aged man – and nonetheless it is age and weariness which permit him to ripen out in this way, to grow silent, and to repose in the radiant idolatry of a woman. It is all over now with the self-surpassing desire that filled him in earlier years for genuine pupils, that is to say genuine continuators of his thought, that is to say genuine opponents: that desire proceeded from the unweakened power, the conscious pride, of being able at any time himself to become the opponent and mortal enemy of his own teachers – what he desires now is resolute party followers, unhesitating comrades, auxiliaries, a pompous processional train. Now he can no longer endure at all the dreadful isolation in which every spirit lives who flies on out ahead; he henceforth surrounds himself with objects of veneration, communality, emotion and love; he wants at long last to enjoy what all the religious enjoy and celebrate within the community that which he values; indeed, in order to possess this community he will invent a religion. Thus does the aged sage live, and in doing so drifts imperceptibly into so wretchedly close an approximation to the excesses of priests and poets that one hardly dares to remember his wise and rigorous youth, the strict intellectual morality he then practiced, and his truly manly dread of inspirations and fantasies. When in earlier years he com pared himself with other, older thinkers, it was so as seriously to measure his weakness against their strength and to grow colder and freer towards himself: now he does it only so as to intoxicate himself in his own delusions. In earlier years he thought with confidence of the thinkers yet to come, indeed he joyfully saw himself extinguished by their more perfect light: now it torments him that he cannot be the last thinker; he ponders how, with the inheritance he will bestow upon mankind, he can also impose upon them a limitation of independent thinking, he fears and reviles the pride and thirst for freedom felt by individualist spirits – : after him none shall have full power over his own intellect, he wants to stand as the bulwark against which the surges of thought in general shall ever afterwards break – these are his secret, and perhaps not always secret desires! The hard fact behind such desires, however, is that he himself has come to a halt before his teaching and has erected in it his boundary-stone, his ‘thus far and no farther’. By canonizing himself he has also displayed above himself his own death certificate: from now on his spirit may not develop father, time has run out for him, the clock stands still. Whenever a great thinker wants to make of himself a binding institution for future mankind, one may be certain that he is past the peak of his powers and is very weary, very close to the setting of his sun.

Daybreak paragraph 542

Auditory

One of the most important modalities within NLP is the auditory system.

The desensualization of higher art. – By virtue of the extraordinary exercise the intellect has undergone through the artistic evolution of modern music, our ears have grown more and more intellectual. We can now endure a much greater volume, much more ‘noise’, than our forefathers could because we are much more practiced in listening for the reason in it than they were. Because they at once inquire after the reason, the ‘meaning’, and are no longer content to know that a thing ‘is’, all our senses have in fact become somewhat blunted: a fact betrayed by, for example, the complete dominance of the well-tempered tonal system; for ears that can still hear the subtle distinction between for example C sharp and D flat are now exceptional. In this matter our ears have become coarser. Then, the ugly side of the world, the side originally hostile to the senses, has now been conquered for music; its sphere of power especially in the domain of the sublime, dreadful and mysterious has therewith increased astonishingly: our music now brings to utterance things which formerly had no tongue. In a similar way, some of our painters have made our eyes more intellectual and have gone far beyond that which was formerly called pleasure in form and color. Here too the side of the world that originally counted as ugly has been conquered by artistic reason. – What will be the consequence of all this? The more capable of thought eye and ear become, the closer they approach the point at which they become unsensual: pleasure is transferred to the brain, the sense-organs themselves grow blunt and feeble, the symbolic increasingly replaces the simple being – and along this path we thus attain to barbarism as certainly as along any other. For the moment we still believe: the world is uglier than ever, but it signifies a more beautiful world than there has ever been. But the more attenuated the fragrant odor of ‘significance’ becomes, the fewer there will be still able to perceive it: and the rest will finally be left with the ugly, which they will try to enjoy directly – an endeavor in which they are bound to fail. Thus there is in Germany a twofold current of musical evolution: on the one hand a host of ten thousand with ever higher, more refined demands, listening ever more intently for the ‘meaning’, and on the other the enormous majority growing every year more and more incapable of comprehending the meaningful even in the form of the sensually ugly and therefore learning to seize with greater and greater contentment the ugly and disgusting in itself, that is to say the basely sensual, in music.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 217

Coaching

One of the most well known applications of NLP is life coaching. NLP has a very good program to make sure that you learn how to make great decisions, feel good no matter what the circumstances, learn to communicate well with others and achieve your goals. In short, it covers the most important aspects of one life.

Where are the needy in spirit? – Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own! Now and then, however, I enjoy an even higher festival: when one is for once permitted to give away one’s spiritual house and possessions, like a father confessor who sits in his corner anxious for one in need to come and tell of the distress of his mind, so that he may again fill his hands and his heart and make light his troubled soul! He is not merely not looking for fame: he would even like to escape gratitude, for gratitude is too importunate and lacks respect for solitude and silence. What he seeks is to live nameless and lightly mocked at, too humble to awaken envy or hostility, with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experience, as it were a poor-doctor of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware who has aided them! Not desiring to maintain his own opinion or celebrate a victory over them, but to address them in such a way that, after the slightest of imperceptible hints or contradictions, they themselves arrive at the truth and go away proud of the fact! To be like a little inn which rejects no one who is in need but which is afterwards forgotten or ridiculed! To possess no advantage, neither better food nor purer air nor a more joyful spirit – but to give away, to give back, to communicate, to grow poorer! To be able to be humble, so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! To have much injustice done him, and to have crept through the worm-holes of errors of every kind, so as to be able to reach many hidden souls on their secret paths! For ever in a kind of love and for ever in a kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment! To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time concealed and renouncing! To lie continually in the sunshine and gentleness of grace, and yet to know that the paths that rise up to the sublime are close by! – That would be a life! That would be a reason for a long life!

Daybreak paragraph 449

Communication

As NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming it is obvious that communication plays a central role in NLP. In the most basic sense NLP is a way to map human behavior by communicating to someone who does something worth mapping. This map is then tried out by the NLP practitioner and if it works for him is than passed on to other people. Through communication again of course.

The “Genius of the Species” — The problem of consciousness (or more correctly : of becoming conscious of oneself) meets us only when we begin to perceive in what measure we could dispense with it: and it is at the beginning of this perception that we are now placed by physiology and zoology (which have thus required two centuries to overtake the hint thrown out in advance by Leibnitz). For we could in fact think, feel, will, and recollect, we could likewise “act” in every sense of the term, and nevertheless nothing of it all need necessarily “come into consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror : as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring, — and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher. What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous? — Now it seems to me, if you will hear my answer and its perhaps extravagant supposition, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the capacity for communication of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the necessity for communication: the latter not to be understood as if precisely the individual himself who is master in the art of communicating and making known necessities would at the same time have to be most dependent upon others for his necessities. It seems to me, however, to be so in relation to whole races and successions of generations where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired as if It were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally (the so-called artists are these heirs in like manner the orators, preachers, and authors: all of them men who come at the end of a long succession, “late-born” always, in the best sense of the word, and as has been said, squanderers by their very nature). Granted that this observation is correct, I may proceed further to the conjecture that consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication – that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying) and has only developed in proportion to its utility. Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man,— it is only as
such that it has had to develop; the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it. The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness – at least a part of them – is the result of a terrible, prolonged “must” running man’s destiny: as the most endangered animal he needed help and protection; he his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood — and for all this he needed ” consciousness ” first of all : he had to “know” himself what he lacked, to “know” how he felt, and to “know” what he thought. For, to repeat it once more, man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part: — for this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go hand in hand. Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pressure and the gestures ; our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity has increased for communicating them to others by means of signs. The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself, — he is doing so still, and doing so more and more. — As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed ; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of “knowing himself”, will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his “averageness” ; — that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness — by the imperious “genius of the species” therein — and is translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual — there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer. . . . This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it : the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalized and vulgarised world ; — that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meager, relatively stupid, — a generalization, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd ; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalization. Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned : I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of “thing in itself” and phenomenon, for we do not “know” enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowings or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species ; and even what is here called “usefulness” is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.

Gay Science paragraph 354

Congruence

Many NLP practitioner try to be congruent. Congruence means that how people feel is in line with what they say. Although congruence is, at times, important as people tends to dismiss your message if you are incongruent.  At the same time, being incongruent on purpose often works wonders too. So the correct application of NLP entails both.

Rough consistency. – It is considered a mark of great distinction when people say ‘he is a character!’ – which means no more than that he exhibits a rough consistency, a consistency apparent even to the dullest eye! But when a subtler and profounder spirit reigns and is consistent in its more elevated manner, the spectators deny the existence of character. That is why statesmen with cunning usually act out their comedy beneath a cloak of rough consistency.

Daybreak paragraph 182

Hint for party leaders. – If you can bring people to declare themselves in favor of something publicly you have usually also brought them to declare themselves in favor of it inwardly; they want to be regarded as consistent.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 548

Consciousness

Who we are is mainly how we subjectively experience ourselves in our conscious mind. Nevertheless, we know that the most of what we do and think is processed in our unconsciousness. Within NLP we make sure that our unconsciousness is programmed the way we want so that we can become more conscious of the great moments of life.

Consciousness. — Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness, which, “in spite of fate”, as Homer says, cause an animal or a man to break down earlier than might be necessary. If the conserving bond of the instincts were not very much more powerful, it would not generally serve as a regulator: by perverse judging and dreaming with open eyes, by superficiality and credulity, in short, just by consciousness, mankind would necessarily have broken down : or rather, without the former there would long ago have been nothing more of the latter! Before a function is fully formed and matured, it is a danger to the organism: all the better if it be then thoroughly tyrannized over! Consciousness is thus thoroughly tyrannized over — and not least by the pride in it ! It is thought that here is the quintessence of man ; that which is enduring, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him! Consciousness is regarded as a fixed, given magnitude ! Its growth and intermittences are denied! It is accepted as the “unity of the organism”! — This ludicrous overvaluation and misconception of consciousness has as its result the great utility that a too rapid maturing of it has thereby been hindered. Because men believed they already possessed consciousness, they gave themselves very little trouble to acquire it— and even now it is not otherwise! It is still an entirely new problem just dawning on the human eye, and hardly yet plainly recognizable: to embody knowledge in ourselves and make it instinctive,— a problem which is only seen by those who have grasped the fact that hitherto our errors alone have been embodied in us, and that all our consciousness is relative to errors!

Gay Science paragraph 11

Education

NLP is important in education. First of all NLP differs from therapy. Within NLP we think that most people who have issues are not broken, and they don’t need to be healed. Instead they haven’t learned yet how to deal easily with difficult situations. So NLP prescribes education instead of medication.

The second point is that NLP works wonders in the classroom. For those people who want to know more about this, go to our specialist website at: Teaching Excellence.

Education. – Education is a continuation of procreation, and often a kind of supplementary beautification of it.

Daybreak paragraph 397

Entertainment

Although nowadays there are many NLP trainer who are themselves trained badly and their NLP training programs are boring, NLP has specific strategies and techniques to make any training entertainment.

The new passion. – Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? Because it would make people unhappier than they are? Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves! – The reason is that our drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference – perhaps, indeed, we too are unrequited lovers! Knowledge has in us been transformed into a passion which shrinks at no sacrifice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction; we believe in all honesty that all mankind must believe itself more exalted and comforted under the compulsion and suffering of this passion than it did formerly, when envy of the coarser contentment that follows in the train of barbarism had not yet been overcome. Perhaps mankind will even perish of this passion for knowledge! – even this thought has no power over us! But did Christianity ever shun such a thought? Are love and death not brothers? Yes, we hate barbarism – we would all prefer the destruction of mankind to a regression of knowledge! And finally: if mankind does not perish of a passion it will perish of a weakness: which do you prefer? This is the main question. Do we desire for mankind an end in fire and light or one in the sand? –

Daybreak paragraph 427

Experience

NLP is all about what you can actually do and your subjective experience.

On the ‘realm of freedom’. – We can think many, many more things than we can do or experience – that is to say, our thinking is superficial and content with the surface; indeed, it does not notice that it is the surface. If our intellect had evolved strictly in step with our strength and the extent to which we exercise our strength, the dominant principle of our thinking would be that we can understand only that which we can do – if understanding is possible at all. A man is thirsty and cannot get water, but the pictures his thought produces bring water ceaselessly before his eyes, as though nothing were easier to procure – the superficial and easily satisfied character of the intellect cannot grasp the actual need and distress, and yet it feels superior; it is proud of being able to do more, to run faster, to be at its goal almost in a twinkling – and thus it is that the realm of thought appears to be, in comparison with the realm of action, willing and experience, a realm of freedom: while in reality it is, as aforesaid, only a realm of surfaces and self-satisfaction.

Daybreak paragraph 125

Experiment

Besides a methodologies and techniques is NLP fore and foremost an attitude. It is an attitude of experimenting. Trying to figure what happens if you do this or that.

Sense for Truth. — Commend me to all scepticism where I am permitted to answer: “Let us put it to the test!” But I don’t wish to hear anything more of things and questions which do not admit of being tested. That is the limit of my “sense for truth”: for bravery has there lost its right.

Gay Science paragraph 51

From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of temptation and experiment, it is still a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainty and health which may not dispense even with wickedness, as a means and fish-hook of knowledge, to that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought- to that inner spaciousness and indulgence of superabundance which excludes the danger that the spirit may even on its own road perhaps lose itself and become infatuated and remain seated intoxicated in some corner or other, to that superfluity of formative, curative, moulding and restorative forces which is precisely the sign of great health, that superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure: the master’s privilege of the free spirit! In between there may lie long years of convalescence, years full of variegated, painfully magical transformations ruled and led along by a tenacious will to health which often ventures to clothe and disguise itself as health already achieved. There is a midway condition which a man of such a destiny will not be able to recall without emotion: it is characterized by a pale, subtle happiness of light and sunshine, a feeling of bird-like freedom, bird-like altitude, bird-like exuberance, and a third thing in which curiosity is united with a tender contempt. A ‘free-spirit’- this cool expression does one good in every condition, it is almost warming. One lives no longer in the fetters of love and hatred, without yes, without no, near or far as one wishes, preferably slipping away, evading, fluttering off, gone again, again flying aloft; one is spoiled, as everyone is who has at some time seen a tremendous number of things beneath him- and one becomes the opposite of those who concern themselves with things which have nothing to do with them. Indeed, the free spirit henceforth has to do only with things – and how many things! – with which he is no longer concerned …

Human, All Too Human, Preface paragraph 4